Jewish Liberal candidate overlooked in WA
The former top rabbi of Australia has written to the Prime Minister after a Jewish candidate was not endorsed in Western Australia in dubious circumstances.
THE former top rabbi of Australia has written to the Prime Minister after a Jewish candidate was not endorsed in Western Australia in dubious circumstances.
Jewish businessman Simon Ehrenfeld won preselection for the state seat of Hillarys, in the outer northern suburbs of Perth, by 26 votes to nine.
But the Liberal State Council in Western Australia intervened and Ehrenfeld was not declared as the Liberal Party’s candidate. Instead the council announced that upper house MP Peter Katsambanis, who is a former chief of staff to party powerbroker Peter Collier, had been preselected.
Former Liberal minister Rob Johnson, who is now an independent, said the “so-called Christian right” vetoed Ehrenfeld’s preselection.
Speaking ahead of Katsambanis’s selection, Johnson said, “They fed off the back of those bigots who just wanted to stop Mr Ehrenfeld, who is Jewish obviously.
“The overwhelmingly endorsed local has been thrown out and this Saturday a factional hack, who has lived most of his life off the taxpayer and arrived from Victoria in 2010, will almost certainly be shoehorned in.”
Perth Hebrew Congregation’s Rabbi Dovid Freilich said that when he learned about the plight of his congregant he had to act. “Simon showed me all of these news clippings from various papers and in them a Member of Parliament mentioned religion,” Rabbi Freilich, a former president of the Organisation of Rabbis of Australasia, told The AJN.
He wrote to Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Western Australian Premier Colin Barnett and said that he wasn’t backing one candidate or another, “but you shouldn’t bring religion into politics like this because that’s between you and Hashem”.
Rabbi Freilich said there had been allegations that state MP Ian Goodenough was “stacking out local branches with church groups to try to stop Ehrenfeld”.
The letter also noted that in February this year, Goodenough told the ABC: “Johnson is promoting a non-local successor who belongs to a non-Christian religion, that is why religion has become an issue in the first place.”
Rabbi Freilich told The AJN, “Let the better man win, but it should not have anything to do with religion, any religion.”
Goodenough denied this week that racism has played any role in the decisions he or the state council have made. WA Liberal Party state director Andrew Cox also denied that anti-Semitism, ethnicity or religion had played a role in the state council’s decision.
JOSHUA LEVI
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